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Comparison of Value- and Reference-Based Memory Page Compaction in Virtualized Systems

Naoki AOYAMA, Hiroshi YAMADA

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Summary :

The issue of copying values or references has historically been studied for managing memory objects, especially in distributed systems. In this paper, we explore a new topic on copying values v.s. references, for memory page compaction on virtualized systems. Memory page compaction moves target physical pages to a contiguous memory region at the operating system kernel level to create huge pages. Memory virtualization provides an opportunity to perform memory page compaction by copying the references of the physical pages. That is, instead of copying pages' values, we can move guest physical pages by changing the mappings of guest-physical to machine-physical pages. The goal of this paper is a quantitative comparison between value- and reference-based memory page compaction. To do so, we developed a software mechanism that achieves memory page compaction by appropriately updating the references of guest-physical pages. We prototyped the mechanism on Linux 4.19.29 and the experimental results show that the prototype's page compaction is up to 78% faster and achieves up to 17% higher performance on the memory-intensive real-world applications as compared to the default value-copy compaction scheme.

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information Vol.E105-D No.12 pp.2075-2084
Publication Date
2022/12/01
Publicized
2022/08/31
Online ISSN
1745-1361
DOI
10.1587/transinf.2022EDP7027
Type of Manuscript
PAPER
Category
Software System

Authors

Naoki AOYAMA
  Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology
Hiroshi YAMADA
  Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology

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